Kharkov Graffiti

After months of stalking the streets of Kharkov with a camera, I proudly present to you this stunning collection: 

Kharkov's Finest Graffiti and Murals

It all began with the colorful brick ruins in Youth Park. The picture below caught my eye on the way to the park. Do you recognize this character?

Hint: he's saying "Cowabunga"

Now squint and imagine that this ninja is slightly more reptilian...
I think it's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle! D tells me that this show was also popular here in 1990s. Although we were thousands of miles and an entire language apart, we were both sitting in pajamas in front of the TV, watching the same thing :p

This one is called "The Duel of the Century" and is an alley near the Pushkinska metro station.

Bender: This is showbusiness, kid. Kenny: MMMM. Beavis: crappuccino.

Who is Robocop pointing his gun at? Why, none other than...

...Alexandr Pushkin, on the opposite wall, ready for a(nother) duel... apparently with Robocop!

And just down the street-

Pushkin and his ladies.

And one more, across from that one:

Eternal love. Follow this link to see a couple more local Pushkin murals.

Finally, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away- oops, I mean, in downtown Kharkov:

I also like finding words scrawled on a wall. It gives me some insight into what people are thinking.
These two pictures were taken near the Botanical Gardens metro station.

Speak Ukrainian.

Heroes don't die, enemies die!

D spotted this one on the outskirts of town.

Shortly after taking this picture, we saw a woman herding goats.

Then, there's always the not-so-nice graffiti.

Death to people from the Caucasus

I saw this word often in Yakutsk...except that the taggers there thought the word was spelled with an a instead of a u, so they'd write things like Fack you!

This is my favorite-

I guess it's universal!

The Simpsons, Ukrainian-style

I think The Simpsons used to be fairly popular in Ukraine. Not so much anymore, though. Now I'm asked every 5 minutes if I watch How I Met Your Mother. Last fall it was House. And the TV show Friends? According to many of my students, Friends will go down in history as the greatest show ever created. There's even a Friends cafe in downtown Kharkov. But in the meantime, I occasionally see hints of The Simpsons' former popularity. Observe:

The Simpsonenko. -nenko is a common ending for Ukrainian last names.

Ad for an attraction at an amusement park in Sevastopol.

Homer is also a part of this pop culture mural on Pushkinska street

But it's not just Ukraine being curious about The Simpsons- the fascination goes both ways, The Simpsons writers are also curious about Ukraine. Has anyone seen the 2011 Simpsons episode featuring Viktor the Ukrainian gangster? There's a short article in the Kyiv Post about it.

Drink champagne

There's a proverb in Russian:

Кто не рискует, тот не пьет шампанское.

Literally, he who doesn't risk, doesn't drink champagne. 

Lately my life in Kharkov has started to get a little more risky. I've been reading a lot of material like Colin Wright's Start a Freedom Business and Chris Guillebeau's The $100 Startup. These books have pushed me to think more about my future. I don't want to stay in Ukraine and teach the same lessons over and over again. I want to stay in Ukraine and find challenges. I wouldn't call myself a businesswoman.... maybe an explorer following Voltaire's poetic idea: if we don't find anything pleasant, at least we'll find something new.

First photos of Euro 2012!

The city is abuzz with chatter, curiosity, and foreigners. It's like someone stuck a stick in an anthill and stirred things up. A hum of excitement hangs in the sky.

This morning I made a mistake with my metro card (for the first time ever, mind you!) and the metro employee, a middle-aged blonde, came to my assistance and then smiled at me. As I wrote last time, smiling is most definitely not in their job description....more like scowling, so I should have realized that something was up right then. Come to think of it, yesterday my students were trading rumors of a Black Eyed Peas / Fatboy Slim concert and other almost unbelievable things, but I didn't realize that TODAY was THE DAY. I guess I'd kind of forgotten-
- until I stumbled across this in Freedom Square.

Lenin's statue is in the background, overlooking all of this p

Clumps of orange-shirted men from the Netherlands were busy partying, shouting, even taking pictures with cops. This is another frankly impossible act: to take a picture with a cop, yet I saw a group of Dutch guys hamming it up for a photo with about 5 cops in stern black uniforms. The cops even looked amused!

In fact, not only can you take pictures freely in public now, but you can also see people smiling in public. Exhibit A) the metro lady this morning. Exhibit B) these girls.

In my experience this is rather atypical behavior for Ukraine! But then again, I've never been here for an event of this magnitude before.

3 cars of them, actually, driving around downtown, waving, smiling, cheering. And handing out flyers for "Philippine Massage" and "Appartments" at the Kakadu Club.

People here often say всё время улыбаются только идиоты, only idiots smile all the time.

Is Kharkov finally ready for Euro 2012?

Preparations for the Euro 2012 tournament continue to change the face of Kharkov.

A giant new addition near the train station. Sorry, haven't managed to get a shot of this in the daytime yet. I did happen to walk by the afternoon they were installing it- these two guys were hanging on ropes at least 70 feet off the ground, slowly unrolling the banner. The building itself is an intimidating hotel that looks like a ministry building out of Orwell's book 1984.

A Ukrainian friend recently sent me this email:
Did you hear the new English announcements in metro? Do you think they sound like English? I think there are several mistakes there. I made inquiries, and found that it was made by a woman who has nothing to do with English. That is how we save money in Ukraine.

These are the announcements I've heard:

• "Train is coming. Please move back from the platform's edge."
• "Doors about to close. Next stop {station name}."
•  once I heard either "hurry up" or "speed up" as the passengers were boarding

To answer your question, the English appears to be okay. A bit accented, but it gets the point across. It's more natural to say "the doors are closing" and they do forget articles a couple of times (ie, "the doors", "the train") but those are small things. It doesn't have to be perfect so long as people can understand it and get the information that they need. I've seen a couple other minor mistakes, like "1th Hospital" instead of "1st Hospital" and this one word:

sguare? you mean square?

 hey, at least the spelling is consistent!

 but overall Kharkov has done a decent job of trying to English-ify itself.

no problems here!

And I've been enjoying the EURO 2012-themed advertising frenzy, especially on the metro trains. These rhyming ads for an electronics store always make me smile.

The ad on the right spells out the sounds of "I am happy very much" using Ukrainian letters.

D tells me that the one on the left references a dirty rhyme :p







Other changes include the addition of perplexing symbols near the metro and on some streets:

 Luckily there's now a guide to these EURO 2012 symbols on the Kharkov Expats Facebook page (but it's in Russian). Some of the symbols are self-explanatory: metro, bus, airport, train station, playing field. Others are not so easy. The movie theater picture represents the fan zones. P&R... park and ride?

Although Kiev has added wi-fi access to parts of its metro, this is not the case in Kharkov as far as I know.

Slightly older news: Kharkov has changed the metro entry system. Tokens are no longer accepted- now you get either a one-time pass (slip of paper) or a reloadable plastic card. These plastic cards used to be rather plain and dark; now they're friendly-looking and bright and have a map of the metro printed on the back. The machines that sell the passes and cards have also been changed. They've got trilingual stickers on them (Russian, Ukrainian, English, if I remember correctly) and only accept certain denominations of bills. Maybe this is why there's always a line around them?

The metro has been showing TV ads of happy citizens using the metro. Pretty cute! Although... the metro attendants do not stand around and smile in real life- instead, they're usually yelling at someone from behind their desks or flirting with a cute police officer.

PS: One final picture, this one from Odessa. Even though they're not hosting any games, they're still getting in the spirit of things.

Happy Euro 2012, everyone!

Name this: Ukraine version

"How many of these symbols do you know?" I spotted this interesting display on the streets of Kiev last month.

First row: recycle, ?, throw stuff in the trash,?
Second row: ?, ?, ?, ?
Third row: ?, ?, ?, ?
Fourth row: no genetic modifications, bar code, ?, ?

Money: 50 grivna

This is Ukraine's 50 grivna note.

As of June 2012, it's worth about $6.50 US or €5.

The man is Mykhailo Hrushevsk, a Ukrainian politician and historian. He died way back in 1934 so I don't blame you if you don't recognize his face.

Quite the beard, no? Now you'll remember him : )

Here's the back of the 50 grivna note.

That is the building of the Центральна Рада, or the Central Council. Guess who was in charge? None other than Mykhailo Hrushevsk, the man with the beard.

Sometimes also called the Central Rada.

This was a short-lived group (1917-1918) that came into existence during Ukraine's very very brief taste of freedom after WWI. Prior to that Ukraine has been under the thumb of several neighboring countries. Shortly after that the Soviet Union came calling and Ukraine became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. By the way, that's when Kharkov, the city I live in, was made the capital of the country for about two decades.

Wikipedia has a long list of what happened to the members of the Central Council (hint: not very happy endings.) Nowadays you'll hear talk of the Верховна Рада, or the Supreme Council. The Supreme Council is Ukraine's current parliament. It wasn't established until 1938.


The Central Council building is still around and you might want to consider seeing it if you are visiting Kiev. I'll ask my historian friend Lena to leave the address in the comment section of this post.

Keep reading:
10 and 20 grivna
100 grivna
500 grivna